Brrrrr

Hi Everybody,

Remember when the temperature was minus 10 degrees and 30 felt like a heat wave.  Well, after a week of 80's and high humidity, 55 degrees feels like we're freezing.  We actually turned on the heat because this is an old apartment that lets all the drafts through, and of course this is New York so we're still looking for the sun today.  Maybe tomorrow!  That's not to say it isn't beautiful here because this is one of the prettiest places ever in the spring.  Every other day a different wildflower blooms or something grows that is a different shade of green and when the sun does shine the sky is absolutely brilliant blue.  We wonder if when the Smith family was homesteading in upstate New York in the 1800's, they had time with trying to stay alive and safe and well fed to stop and smell the flowers.

What an exciting week you've all had with graduation and school ending and the anticipation of summer vacation!  It's nice to take a "vacation" once in a while!  We got our last far away seminaries visited last week and even got the time to go to our first soccer game in over a year.  It was a state cup game for one of the seminary kids who thinks it's cool that Dad/Grandpa knows soccer and that I wear a soccer ball necklace.....he doesn't know I know soccer too.  They lost.....bummer!  And as soon as the game was over the loudspeaker over the whole complex came on to tell everybody to evacuate the fields immediately because a huge, dangerous lightning storm was coming our way.  So we left!!  We were driving home 40 minutes in the opposite direction as the storm so we missed it.....whew!!  Anyway, back to Seminary.  The students are still in school so they're just taking the new assessments and are totally stressing out about things.  We really like this new Seminary and Institute program.  The lessons are so good, similar to the youth curriculum where the students do a lot of the teaching and asking and answering of questions themselves. You (to the grandkids) are bright!!!!  We wish we would have had your Gospel knowledge and habits for study when we were your age.  We may hang out with the young single adults all the time, but we surely don't have their ability to go to bed late and get up early!  Going to bed at midnight and getting up at 4:00 a.m. is for the birds.  The one seminary we have left is just a couple of blocks from our house here so that means we can be like the kids and roll out of bed at 6:00 a.m. to be there by 6:30.  But we promise not to be grumpy or sleep through the lesson!  We'll bring the muffins or donuts!!

It was great this week to have parts of a couple of days (aside from helping people move, fixing air-conditioners, etc.) to try and "put our house in order."  That means that we cleaned and organized for the first time in 28 weeks!  There is much left to do but we made a good start.  We've learned you can do a lot with a couple of extra shelves and some boxes from Salvation Army!  Now if we can just remember what new places we put everything in!  We fed the Elders a couple of days this week.  Here's a new way to invite yourself to dinner.  "Elder Jolley, can we come use your computer for a few minutes and would you care if we brought a few things to eat for dinner."  Pretty inventive isn't it!  And this is all said in sad voices so of course we'll invite them to have dinner with us!  We love it!!!!!!  The branch and ward are great in providing meals nearly every day for the missionaries and we pick up the slack if needed and we know about it.  The missionaries really love transfer breakfast.  We've mentioned this before but it's when they all come over the day before or of transfer day and we eat lots and lots of bacon and eggs and pancakes and hashbrowns......and chocolate milk!!  We lost two wonderful missionaries to other areas this week from our district and two from our great companionships in Owego.  We feel like our grandkids are moving out of the house when that happens!  It also means that we get to drive missionaries to Utica and go to the meetings there to welcome new missionaries and hear the testimonies of those going home which is always such a great experience.  And this was President and Sister Wirthlin's last transfer meetings as well as they'll be leaving to go home on July 1st.  Bittersweet!!  Next transfer brings the wave of newly graduated from high school missionaries or those who've just finished a semester of college.  Our poor new president is going to have to deal with the logistics of over 40 new missionaries in the next two transfers (which is an all time record for this mission) but what is exciting is that some areas previously closed will be reopened and possibly even some new areas opened.  The work moves on!!  On a side note, with transfers and institute and a seminary visit, over one 24 hour period we put 360 miles on our car .  Bless the Toyota!!

So we'll finish this email with a new assignment which we never anticipated.  Our neighbor, John from upstairs, was gone from his apartment for about 10 days but his mail kept piling up.  His car was gone and we didn't hear any of his pets so we just figured he'd gone on vacation or something.  But it was unusual for him to not tell us he was leaving and when he does go he's only gone for a couple of days and his mailbox was literally overflowing.  So we decided to check around to see if anybody knew where he was but nobody knew anything.  So we finally decided to call his work place and found out that he was on medical leave.  Long story short, he got sick, drove himself to Cuyuga Medical Center which is about 10 minutes away and they immediately took him by ambulance to another speciality hospital in Pennsylvania where he had two emergency surgeries and is very sick.  But here's the painful part.  Nobody knew that his pets were in the house all that time (we thought maybe he'd taken them to a kennel).  So when John's ex-wife finally found out he was in the hospital and got here, the animals were almost gone.  They'd survived on water left in the pet dishes and what little was in the toilet bowl but were in pretty bad shape  So.....back to our new assignment.  For the last few days and probably all of this next week, we've become pet-sitters.  They're getting back to normal and we feed them and exercise them every day until John gets home.

Only one more day in May and then it's June.....my gosh where are the days flying off too!!!!  We hope you all have a happy week ahead of you and we know that you'll do good things this week that will bless the lives of everyone around you.  We love you!!!!!

XOXOXO  Dad and Mom and Grandpa and Grandma and Elder and Sister Jolley (aka Von and Patty)

Happy Birthday to You!!!

Hi Everybody,

We understand that we're missing the birthday dinner tonight?!  We hope the birthday song lives up to its normal standard of badness!!  We'll eat ice cream tonight and pretend that we're celebrating with you.  In fact, ice cream is probably what we'll have for dinner tonight.  We just got home from helping at a great but absolutely wipe us old people out weekend in Palmyra with a YSA Regional Conference called Gathering in the Grove.  Actually we did the same thing when we had only been on our mission for a couple of months and this year we knew what we were doing which was nice.  We started out the weekend with a session at the Palmyra Temple, then helping to register about 300 young single adults from as far away as Nova Scotia.  In fact, there was quite a large contingent from Canada.  They all just kept coming and kept coming and kept coming.  Friday night all the kids camping in the Hill Cumorah campground froze to death because the temperature got down to 29 degrees!   But they survived!!  And Saturday morning they all got up and went to a devotional in the Sacred Grove at 7:00 a.m.  It was amazing that so many went that early (and on time) but probably partly because many of them didn't sleep that night trying to stay warm!  We continued registering at the campground during the devotional and we froze the hour and a half we were outside!  Even froze up the computers!  But then the sun came out and it was beautiful the entire rest of the Conference.  Saturday was a day of eating and workshops and service projects and more eating and a keynote speaker and more eating and a dance and more eating.  Bet you can't guess what we helped with!  Made us appreciate that feeding 50 people for Friday Forum is a piece of cake compared to feeding the multitudes at GIG.  Also on that day was a great keynote speaker from Israel, Daniel Rona.  He was introduced as an American and a Jew and a Mormon.  He lives in Jerusalem but he and his wife currently live in SLC where they are serving a mission in the Church Historical Department.  He gave a great talk titled "Restoring the Identity of Israel on a Journey From Ancient Holy Lands to Latter-day Promised Lands."  It's a talk he gives at many firesides and gatherings and the young adults loved it.  He hung around for most of the Conference and interacted with the kids and ate with them and visited with them one on one and generally seemed to have a good time with them.  We got a chance to visit with him for a few minutes as we both have the Browns in common.  We had heard of him several years ago but had lost track of his activities since then. So....he was good.  Then we chaperoned the dance that night and cleaned up after and got back to our hotel after midnight.  Today (Sunday) was much more relaxed with Church and lunch and then cleaning up and getting young adults on their way.  Then we came home, stopped off a a branch picnic to say goodbye to all leaving this week as they graduated today.  Cornell holds their graduation on Sunday....kind of lame because that means the kids have to choose between going to Church and graduation.  Such is Cornell.

Anywho.....About the only thing we can remember at the beginning of the week is visiting early morning seminaries....up at 4:00 a.m., on the road by 5:00 a.m. to be to class by 6:00 a.m.  We'll finish them up this next week and then we will take a long nap!  It seems that the rest of the day is a blur when one begins at that time of day.  Can't remember what we taught at our Institutes this week but we know we taught them!!  Actually we taught on Following the Living Prophet as a beginning lesson of our summer program.  How grateful we are for the guidance and counsel of our living Prophets.  And how we support them, and "heed" their words, and love them and pray for them.  What would we do in this world today without the blessing of living Prophets!!  We're now holding Institute in the summer at the Church which is absolutely wonderful because you can actually find a place to park.  Anabel Taylor Hall on campus (our normal place) closes their building at 5:00 p.m. every day during the summer and our kids can still only come to Institute at night.  We're picking up a few kids from the other units in the stake at our Cornell class which is nice.  Last week, when we thought our numbers would go down considerably, they went up.

Other than an airport run to Syracuse to pick up a young woman coming to Ithaca for her sister's graduation, that has been our week.  This next one promises to be just as busy because we add in a transfer day.  We really don't like transfers!!  It means we loose missionaries that we love to other parts of the mission and we wonder if we'll ever see them again.  We're loosing our great Elder Pyper who came here 4 transfers ago as a brand new missionary, and Sister Gelinas who's a wonderful Sister Missionary that we only got for two transfers.  We will miss them!!!  The mission is only getting 3 new missionaries this transfer and so some areas will have to be consolidated for the next 6 weeks so President Wirthlin is really shaking things up.  This will be his last transfer as well as he and Sister Wirthlin are released on July 1 and President and Sister Rogers (from St. George) will come in as new Mission President.  Three days later, he'll be greeting 22 new missionaries (a mission record) and boy will they have to start swimming because they'll be opening up new areas and re-opening closed areas.  The missionary work marches on.....especially after high school graduation!!

It's time to say goodnight!  This is such a great week for all of you with the end of school.  We hate to miss graduation!  We hope you can gather together and imagine that we're there and be sure and take lots of pictures for us of everything that is going on.  Our time is flying by and we're trying to cram as much good stuff into it as we can.  Although at times this mission is hard, hard, hard, it is so good and so worth the effort and sacrifice and C-ooking E-very S-econd.  "The Church has need of willing old people who wear the worker's seal.  Come help the good work move along.  Put your shoulder to the wheel."  Or in our case, your hands on the wheel (steering), your finger to the phone (texting), your brain to the books (scriptures that is) and your heart to loving this work and these amazing young people (missionaries) we serve with and young adults we play with.  Life is good!!!!  And WE LOVE YOU a bushel and a peck and a virtual hug around the neck from New York.

.

XOXO  Dad and Mom and Gpa and Gma and E Jolley Jr. and Elder-ette Jolley (I need to repent and start referring to myself as Sister Jolley)

There is beauty all around...

Happy Sunday Afternoon, Everybody,

It is absolutely beautiful here in Upstate New York!  Last week we went to bed one night and woke up the next morning and it was totally green outside.  The trees are green and the ones that aren't green are covered with blossoms, the grass is green, the wild flowers are gorgeous, and finally more often than not this week, the sun shone and the sky was a brilliant blue.  Digital cameras are the best because we can take a zillion photographs.  We're sorry Utah had so much rain.....mostly during the state track meet....but glad you're getting the moisture that you're needing.  Does this mean you've already had summer and by the time we come home in the fall, it will be winter??  We've really liked our walking outside instead of in the grocery store....the waterfalls, the Plantations, Sapsucker Woods.  We've surely gotten slower this last year though.  Maybe by the end of the summer, we'll be back up to where we need to be. 

We don't miss all the cooking for Friday Forum, but we miss all the people at Friday Forum.....our non-members who came, the students who work in Anabel Taylor Hall, even the ones who see the "free lunch" sign wand just stop in and we never see them again.  But it's nice to not be going a hundred miles an hour for many, many hours in the day most days of the week.  But we're trying to catch up on what we left behind the last two semesters, clean the pantry and the freezer so we know what's in them (I wonder if we accidently put the toothpaste in one of those two places), get our summer institute programs ready, and finish up the last of the semester's work with CURW.  But.....in the next 3 weeks, we need to visit all the early-morning Seminaries and give them the rah, rah for Institute wherever they happen to be this next fall.  Dad's already put in a couple of air conditioners for a family in the branch and is doing all the backed up computer work that has been put on the back burner this last year.  We had a zone leader training this week, our last meeting with the chaplains until summer is over, a birthday party for a cute 5 year old, and our two Institutes.  It has been such a great experience to teach the Book of Mormon this past year, and we were sad to have our last classes in that this last week.  It is a volume of scripture that is for our time!  At our Institute in Owego last week we had 22 people come.  It was amazing!  Everybody that's come off and on over the last year all decided to come at the same time.  It helped that we were having red velvet cupcakes and ice cream.  We hope some of you teenagers got to watch the on-line world-wide fireside with Elder and Sister Bednar.  It was a totally unscripted question and answer session with them and was so good.  How grateful we are for Prophets and Apostles to guide us and give us direction!  In fact, our summer institute will most likely be Teachings of the Living Prophets.  It seems like more and more we need to follow the Prophets given particularly the moral and social climate that we live in.  This is the 20th Anniversary of the Family Proclamation, and I remember hearing it given as though it were last week.  We thought it was really a good, solid declaration of what we believe....never even thinking that 20 years later, it would be absolutely crucial to proclaim to the WORLD what marriage and family means. 

We're imagining all the end-of-the-school-year things going on these last couple of weeks.  Maybe we'll have a last day of school picnic and pretend you're all here.  So when is the last day of school?  We actually had a picnic last week on Preparation Day and it was so nice to sit by the waterfall and do nothing....absolutely nothing.  Are there any special family plans for Memorial Day?  We'll be spending the weekend in Palmyra for the Palmyra/Rochester Stakes Gathering in the Grove, a Regional YSA Conference.  They put us to work when we come but there's still some down time to go to the temple and visit the Sacred Grove and other Church History sites.  There's a wonderful little place to stay called The Palmyra Inn that is within walking distance of all the sites except the Hill Cumorah and we like to be there.  We also like the opportunity to work shoulder to shoulder with the other CES couples who come to help as well.  Besides working together, we pick each other's brains to look for ways to do our own assignments better.  And it's also nice to do something with people who go the same speed as we do!  But hey, we had a great YSA FHE last week and played Pictionary and I do have to say we're pretty good at it!

Well, our nothing after Church day now has a meeting in it....actually it's a meeting we really like going to, Branch Missionary Correlation Meeting, because these Elders and Sisters are the best and they make us better missionaries.  We love you all and we pray for you all and when you're doing something that we would normally be to, just remember that our work is here but we allow our hearts for a minute or two to be with all of you.  We love you....oh we already said that.  So what.....we'll say it 3 times.WE LOVE YOU!  And now we're going to go outside and sit on our mini patio until time to go to the meeting.

XOXOXOXOXO  Dad and Mom and Grandpa and Grandma and Elder and Elder-ette Jolley

PS  We met an 84 year old man last week that drove out here by himself from Utah to visit his grand-daughter whose husband is graduating from Cornell.  And on his way out and on his way back he's visiting all the temples that are anywhere near the area.  We think he said he was making it to 17 temples in 3 weeks....and he's 84 years old!!

Technology Rocks!!

Hi  Everybody,

After skyping for the "opening of the next mission call" and the facetime from home for the missionaries and for mother's day,  there's hardly anything left to say!  But....here's what we forgot:

1.  District activity this week, at our house, playing board games wherein we even win once or twice, finished off a XXX Large bag of peanut M and M's, lunch (Elders eat A LOT!), and just generally a great time.

2.  Cleaned a lake cabin so the YSA can have their closing social there....a couple of them helped....sort of.  It was one of the first cabins ever built on Cayuga Lake in the 1920's.  Beautiful view!!

3.  Played Mom and Dad ( or Grandpa and Grandma) to one of our most awesome YSA's who had foot surgery.  We did the whole thing....sat in the waiting room, went to recovery....even talked to the doctor.

4.  Avoided Cornell's annual Slope Day.  Parents would absolutely die if they knew what their kids were doing in a school sponsored activity.  Lots of wild music, booze that the plans are in place to control but the students find a way to beat the system, not much clothes on because it was a hot day, basically a pretty bad place to be . PS The Slope is a huge grassy hill....probably one of the prettiest places on campus except for when it's covered with drunk, semi-dressed college kids.

5.  Held Institute outside in the courtyard of our building that night (the building was locked down to keep drunk kids out of it) just a hundred yards from "The Slope" after all the party-ers left and it was quiet.  What a contrast!  How grateful we are for what we have!!!!

6  Two closing socials....YSA at the lake house with lots of food and fun.  We went for awhile but then had an appointment to visit a family with the missionaries.  Second closing social was the Branch in the Branch President's yard.  More food and fun.  We will miss these great young married and young single people who are graduating and off on their next adventures (nearly half the branch).

7.  HIGHLIGHT OF THE WEEK!!  Visit to the Cornell Special Collections of Olin Library with the Head Librarian of the University with CURW (Cornell United Religious Work).  Part of her presentation included a display of rare sacred texts of our various faiths.....including a 1st Edition copy of the Book of Mormon.  We had seen the Book last summer by special appointment and we thought it was an amazing experience even though all we could do was look from about 5 feet away.    After the presentation last week, The Librarian invited us (there were maybe 10 of us there) to come closer to all these books and all of a sudden she picked up the Book of Mormon and handed it to us!!  So....we got to stand there and go through the pages and read from a first edition Book of Mormon printed on the very Grandin Press in Palmyra!  Our minds went all over the place wondering who held that book when it was very first published and since....a first missionary, a pioneer, an early member of the Church, an early ancestor, maybe even the Prophet Joseph???  This will be an un-forgetable experience!

So.....that's this week in a nutshell.  The missionary force is growing!!  We have to figure out a way to take soon-to-be Elder Jacklin and his companion to lunch on our way home from our mission in the fall the same as Sister Jacklin in Minnesota and Elder Jolley in North Dakota.  Of course this would only be with permission of the missionaries and their mission presidents.  How can we get to Los Angeles on our way home from New York?!  It was just plain wonderful to see and talk to you all when Zac opened his mission call and on Mother's Day.  And it was fun to be on this end of the calls of our missionaries to their homes in Utah and Texas and Maryland.  They all came here and skyped their families from our computers and the families of missionaries are the best!  Especially ours!!!

We love you-----have a great week!!  Whoop-tee-doo the Gospel's true!  Which one of you used to sign your letters that way??

XOXOXOXO  Dad and Mom and Grandpa and Grandma, E and S etc etc etc

It's a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood!!!

Happy May Everyone,

Today is a beautiful day in Ithaca....sun shining, 73 degrees, blue sky, magnolia trees are flowering, grass is green, trees not far behind....you know, sort of like your February was!  We hear that it is very dry in Utah and that the cities are already having to put water restrictions on homeowners.  We'll pray for rain along with you....in fact we'll pray that the rain that usually dumps on us in the summer dumps on you first.  It has been such a long winter here that days like today make us feel like we've died and gone to heaven.  We're just missing sitting on the sidelines of something-or-another game or watching the band march or a track meet.  We still look as though we haven't seen sun for many moons and we haven't.  We did go to a couple of innings of a high school baseball game the other afternoon which was really nice.  A young man from the Owego Ward plays and we told him we'd try and come to one of his games....his team had a substantial lead when we left.

So the kids are in their last month of school...do we hear a yay??  Consider yourselves lucky....public school doesn't get out around here until nearly the end of June; (but then they don't start until after Labor Day either).  So this next half of this month it will be time for us to again go visit the early morning seminaries and try and get them enthused about Institute.  We don't see much fruits of our labors because the seniors are just counting down the days until school and those 5:00 am wakeup calls are over.  Our numbers in Institute and FHE will go down considerable this summer as the students will start trickling out when finals are over in a couple of weeks.  We loose several YSA to graduation from Cornell, a few to summer jobs and internships, and almost a half of our married graduate students will graduate with PhD's and are off to their first "real" jobs.  We'll see what the fall brings.  We've been told to heads up that there may be Sundays when we have a dozen or so branch members here on Sunday for Church.  It will be interesting to see how we can find cohesiveness as a branch.....but also a good challenge for all of us to find the many, many less active members who've come here to get lost and are doing a good job of it.  Oh how they're needed....we need them and they need us.

Once today is over, it will feel like the weight of being CES (Cooking Every Second) missionaries is off our shoulders for a couple of months.  Today is CES Devotional and the traditional waffles and ice ice cream.  We could have 10 here or we could be out the back door with 30.  Somewhere in between would be nice.  It seems like we just barely had our spring devotional last month and this will probably be our last one....unless all the YSA between the ages of 8 and 18 want to come to our house in Orem next fall.  We'll have to have a "fireside" or two for all the grandkids when we get home (and combine it with a sleepover??).  We are going to work really hard the next few months to NOT get trunky because that is not a good thing to do.  We had our last Friday Forum last Friday and guess what.....they gave us a standing "ovation" so maybe we fed them well.  We fed on an average of 45 kids every Friday for 28 weeks.  Whew!  So the crockpots are put away and the roaster pan is getting a rest and the many cake pans and cookie sheets will go on rotation because all that will be left to feed are the missionaries and the treats for our Institutes.  One nice thing too is that in a couple of weeks Institute and FHE will transition to the Church instead of on the campus because our building closes down after 7:00.  Cornell needs to take some of these leisure summer hours and spread them over a little into the fall and winter and then maybe the kids wouldn't be on the edge of falling off a cliff between September and the end of May.  We finished off a busy last week with me going to a Stake Women's Conference here in Ithaca which was great and Dad working outside and inside getting our Summer and Fall schedule together.  Then we helped with a "Family Dance" sponsored by the ward which turned out so well.  The dance all started with a conversation over folding clean laundry at the laundromat a couple of months ago.  Liz was telling me about her dream of doing a dance before she left Ithaca.  Her husband, Sam, graduates in a few weeks.  There is NO PLACE to go to a dance in Ithaca that doesn't involve being in a bar and involving much drinking and other stuff.  I was telling her about my remembering the "family dances" we used to have in the old Firth Ward cultural hall with Uncle Dale and Aunt Beth and their band playing the music.  So Liz decided to do a family dance and it was a rousing success.  She was hoping for a few families and kids to come....maybe 30 or 40 people....and over 120 ended up being there.  Especially the little kids loved it....dancing with their parents and parents dancing with babies in backpacks and it was just fun.

So....what will we do to keep us busy this summer?  We don't think it will be hard.  We still have summer institute classes and are trying to decide now what to teach....maybe teachings of the living prophets?  Foundations of the Gospel?  It needs to fit into a 3 month time frame.  Our Owego Institute won't change much which will be nice.  We average around 15 people there each week and we love meeting with them.  They are all so kind to us there and we will especially miss them when it's time to finish our mission.  Then it's always good to find service opportunities in and out of the branch and ward and go searching for the lost sheep and helping the young Elders and Sisters and we hope to get the apartment painted this summer and also get it a little better organized for the next couple to come in September.  But what really is exciting is to look forward to having the visits this summer of those who are coming but missing the ones who can't even if we did see them last Thanksgiving.  There are many waterfalls to see and trails to hike and maybe? Antique shops to visit....besides all the wonderful Church historical sites that we've grown to love....especially the Hill Cumorah Pageant.  We'll volunteer to be tour guides if anyone decides they need to visit Upstate New York after we get back.

Well, it's time to go get the waffle iron heated and the cream whipped and the berries cleaned and see if we have enough chocolate syrup to go around.  Have a happy week this week.  In fact have a happy month and in the middle of everything that has to be done, take time to count your blessings, and smell the roses, and sit in the sun with your eyes closed and have a picnic even if it's just a peanut butter sandwich on the front steps.  We love you all....we love that you love each other.  And we know that Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ love you for your goodness and your good choices and your good works to others.

XOXOXO  Dad and Mom and Grandpa and Grandma and Elder and Elder-ette Jolley